Who am I?

I have a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Chicago, but all of my scholarly work over the past decade or so has had to do with Shakespeare,
Elizabethan theater history, and biography. I'm a member of the Shakespeare Association of America, the Modern Language Association, and the
Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, and I've done extensive archival research focused on livery companies, apprenticeship, and places other
than playhouses (such as inns and taverns) where plays were performed in sixteenth-century London. I have had articles and reviews published in
Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Newsletter, Shakespeare Bulletin, Early Theatre, and
Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama. I wrote 37 articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
published in September 2004 by Oxford University Press, and 71 articles for the forthcoming Greenwood Encyclopedia of Shakespeare,
being published in 2009. As of mid-2008, I also have two chapters (on "Players, Livery Companies, and Apprentices" and "Innyard Playhouses")
forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook on Theatre History, edited by Richard Dutton, and an article ("Alice Layston and the Cross Keys")
forthcoming in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. For the past decade, I've also maintained a
Biographical Index of English Drama Before 1660, available online at http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/bd/, which will eventually become a full-fledged Biographical Dictionary. Specifically on authorship-related matters -- in addition to maintaining the Shakespeare Authorship page with Terry Ross -- I wrote a chapter called "The Question of Authorship" for the volume Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (2003), edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin; in April 2001 I was the co-leader (with Jonathan Hope) of a seminar on "Theory and Methodology in Authorship and Attribution Studies" at the World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia, Spain; and I have discussed Shakespeare and the authorship question in newspapers and on radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio. I'm also a Chartered Financial Analyst who makes my living as a mutual fund analyst for Morningstar in Chicago.